Brit Bennett

Brit Bennett is a literary fiction author born and raised in Oceanside in North San Diego County in South California. Oceanside exposed her to a lot of different cultures as it was a racially diverse town with a beach that had people from all socioeconomic backgrounds vacationing there. It was a conservative town that is pervaded with military culture, though she has always felt an inside out dynamic as her family was not a military one. As a teenager, she went to Sanford University and later attended the University of Michigan where she got her MFA in creative fiction. It was at the latter institution where she won the Wright/Hurston award for College Writers in 2014 and the Hopwood Award in Graduate Fiction. She is also a winner of the Robert M. Golden Thesis and the Guerard/Bocock prize that she got as an undergraduate at Stanford. In the years preceding the publishing of her first novel “The Mothers,” she had built an impressive brand as a social commentator working for some of the biggest publications in the United States. She had her huge break with “I Don’t Know What to Do With Good White People,” an essay that she published in “Jezebel” that had over a million shares. Since then, her work has been featured in several publications such as “The Brian Lehrer show in NPR,” “The New York Times Magazine,” “The Paris Review,” and “The New Yorker.”